Burning Paper Hearts
by icecreamlova
Summary: Elena tries her best to forget everything the vampires brought into her life, but it's hard when the words stare at her, right off the pages of her diary. Or: the one where Elena's diary actually comes in useful. Post-3x20, 3x22


_**Warnings**__: Mentions of canon abuse, character death._

* * *

**Burning Paper Hearts  
**_By icecreamlova_

- : -

It begins when she brings out her diary again.

She's had too little time, and too many thoughts, to figure out where to start. Her pen's clenched between her teeth, uncomfortably smooth plastic that will probably crack too easily.

She doesn't like to read earlier entries. They bring back too many emotions by themselves: all the darkness, and all the things she's done. All the mistakes that could have been avoided if she'd only had the information she has now.

Elena sets her pen on paper, and nothing flows out.

The itch is there, but the editing she has to do is awful. "Damon" and "Stefan" and "Jeremy" and "Bridge", all disappearing beneath vicious cross-outs.

(She used to keep her diary pristine, the imprint of her words barely showing on the next page. Some revelations seem obscene when written so freely, though. It's more comforting to have them invisible beneath a sea of ink, and Elena does it readily, telling herself of the trouble it had brought when Jeremy read her diary, what seems like so long ago.)

She writes about Alaric instead, and the sacrifice he made. One day, maybe, the thought will cross her mind without hitching, as smooth as her hand crossing the page.

- : -

Dear Diary,

Jeremy opened his eyes this morning. I've never been so relieved to see him still asleep on his bed at noon, that lazy ass, but his chest was moving.

I should know. I stood there and watched. I checked his ring a couple of times too, and now know the exact shape of the symbols on it.

This is the only place I'll ask why Damon did it. He's always known not to make us something we're not. I shouldn't care. It shouldn't matter _why_, only that Jeremy was standing one moment, and the next he wasn't.

I thought I realized, when Mom and Dad died, that writing doesn't make it fade away. Not that quickly. Just in case, though, I'm going to write it down now. Damon did this.

I'll never forget.

- : -

Stefan makes her happy.

When he's the way he is now, he makes her happier than anything else has in the last godforsaken few months. The world is a brighter place, and anything is worth it to _feel_ the sun warming her face.

The past months are nothing. This time, it's not going to fall apart; it's not going to happen again.

Their hands curl together, and her heart leaps wildly. This is how a rabbit's heart must pound when it's running for its life. His grip is tighter than hers - he's so much stronger, surer. She's fragile by comparison. Stefan smiles tentatively, guilty pain lining his face. He's let it all back in, like she told him to.

She wonders for an instant what Damon would say- probably something along the lines of, '_You're not allowed to feel my pain. It belongs to me. Yours is just a cheap knock-off._ ' She doesn't _want_ to be like Damon.

They don't talk about the past.

- : -

Elena runs her finger down the centre of her diary, creasing the page.

She stares through her windowpanes, into the night.

- : -

Dear Diary,

We've been on the road for weeks now. Still no sign of Stefan unless you count the body parts he left behind.

Damon didn't want me to see them. I wish he'd told me earlier, but I don't know if I would have been prepared.

- : -

Dear Diary,

Stefan and Klaus found me at school.

- : -

(Her hands are trembling. Her heart races like she's running a marathon, and she feels her pulse behind her collarbone. She closes the book.

She opens her diary again the next day, and this feeling is unfamiliar:

Anger remembered. It's awful and unfamiliar, and very, very, right, and it refuses to be buried this time.)

- : -

Dear Diary,

Stefan drove me to Wickery Bridge.

Stefan. _Stefan_.

Maybe Klaus managed to compel him again. Is he on vervain? But Stefan hated Klaus, even then. He did it because when he looked out over the water, he didn't see _me_. I thought only Katherine was allowed to have my face.

But even Katherine never did this.

He knew. He's known for months what Wickery Bridge means to me.

- : -

(Back, several pages, a whole book-a whole lifetime, it feels-back:

Dear Diary,

There are bite marks on Caroline's neck.

Damon. He made them.

Did Stefan know?)

- : -

She's supposed to be happy.

She shouldn't need to read through the past, when they were StefanandElena, and they'd kissed on top of a Ferris wheel. She shouldn't tremble with fury as she reads through pieces of her life, and realizes just what is driving this feeling, like she's just short of exploding. She shouldn't be remembering the taste of copper on her tongue, burning, acrid, gasping for breath, how her had head spun as she thought of the water below, swallowing her whole.

She looks at the entries, and wonders where "_I'll never forget_," is. If they're hidden somewhere beneath ink, or if she even wrote them in. (And maybe she knows.)

Maybe that's what makes the edge so bitter.

- : -

Stefan makes her happy except for when he makes her hurt without laying a finger on her; so much, it's like her insides are trying to claw their way out as tears come streaming down her face. It's just too easy to forget, in those moments when the world seems bright.

Damon never did - the good or the bad. But with Damon, at least, this fire in her throat is familiar. She knows what to do.

- : -

Elena is eighteen years old. She's old enough to start looking into colleges.

Caroline wrinkles her nose, but she dives into it enthusiastically too. She tells Bonnie, plainly, that her research skills really are magical, so they won't need Bonnie's. Bonnie doesn't even pretend to be affronted, just laughs along.

She might not survive. But if she does, they can't be her home.

- : -

(There's only one silver lining, and she doesn't want to call it that, but she will. They would do this for her. They let her go, when she asked. Eventually.

Stefan at least had always known this moment was coming. Damon simply pretended not to.

It was almost funny actually, in an obscene way, how one thing led to another. Damon to Stefan. Damon's face was cold, in the way that meant he felt something very strongly. "And you'll just, what? Take weekend trips to get your dose of adrenaline and hide from the Originals in the crowd?"

She crossed her arms, refusing to lean backwards. He always seemed too close, when he talked like this. "They don't want me anymore."

"Klaus does." That was Stefan. Short and to the point. His face twisted for the briefest moment until he remembered that Klaus had _let_ Stefan hate him.

"And he'll know where I am, if I stay here," Elena pointed out. And she did not want to _be_ here, or _feel_ like this.

Damon and Stefan exchanged looks, as though she couldn't see them. As though coin flips, stakes, and promises weren't fresh in her memory.

"You're risking your life unnecessarily," Damon said.

She would not say it to Stefan, but Damon was a different story. She never let him see her tears and vulnerabilities, had not allowed anyone but Stefan handle those if she could help it, but prickly anger, fury, she could trust Damon with that. "No. I'm risking my life here. Around _you_."

Stefan closed his eyes, at the impending argument.

"Well excuse _me_ for saving your life when vampires come for you!" Damon glared at her, furiously; behind him, Stefan glanced at her again.

"Elena, it's not his fault," Stefan said, and just like that, Elena knew what to say.

(Tomorrow, she would stop using Damon, and Damon would stop letting her.)

"He never saved me from _you_."

Stefan's arms, reaching out for her, dropped by his sides. Her pang of regret was flattened by the memories, memories she hadn't consciously thought of until then. So went the conscious effort to be Elena Gilbert, Jenna's niece, Miranda's daughter, because - she wasn't that girl any longer, was she?

_She_ was the girl whose ex-boyfriend had dangled her off the bridge where her parents died.

"Anywhere else," Elena said, except her voice broke. _Now_ it broke. "You could have brought me _anywhere_ else."

Stefan only nodded. Strangely, this calm acceptance angered her further. How was she supposed to shout at someone who didn't shout back?

"I _trusted_ you," she said, except it was a croak, and her fingernails bit into her palm. "You threw it back in my face like I was your _enemy_. Like I was _Klaus_! Like we didn't try to save you when you killed your way across the country!"

Stefan's face went through a series of emotions, before finally setting on regret. "I wasn't my-" And then he stopped. "I did."

There it was.

She contemplated throwing them out, but she didn't own the boarding house, whoever's name was written on the deed. She thought about bringing up even older scars still, but that seemed so tiring. So futile.

"I'm sorry," Stefan said. All this time, he had never said it before.

Some part of her almost wanted to say _thank you_, or _**I'm**_ _sorry_, because that part felt awful yelling at Stefan, when he had said nothing during this whole conversation. It was that feeling that cinched it. Elena looked him in the eye. She nodded.

And then she walked out the door.)

- : -

Except that never happened.

Except that night when Alaric was newly gone in the way that mattered most, her pen had pressed into the page until her fingers hurt, and she had sobbed until her eyes and chest ached. Looking into the past hurt too much. She'd closed the book, memories hidden away, and held onto the person who'd made her so happy, the first time she felt like this.

For some reason, she thinks briefly of that moment as water streams through her hair, and she watches Matt being dragged to the surface.

- : -

She'll wake up, one hour or one day later, just later, and in the shock of a paradigm shift, those entries will be forgotten, but waiting for the day when she's ready.

- : -

**Well?**


End file.
